Richard Grenell quits Team Romney

A turbulent two-week saga surrounding Mitt Romney’s choice of a foreign policy spokesman came to an abrupt end Tuesday, as Richard Grenell announced he was resigning from his position with the former Massachusetts governor’s presidential campaign.

Romney’s selection of Grenell, a brash former adviser to U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, was noteworthy for a number of reasons: Conservative foreign-policy hands generally approved of his selection, and he was to be the first openly gay spokesman for the Romney campaign.

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But Grenell’s hiring generated controversy almost from the moment it was announced, both because of the operative’s actions and what sources described as tension over the exact role he was to play in the campaign.

Within days of his appointment, Grenell had to apologize for having made a series of off-color comments about prominent women — including Callista Gingrich and Rachel Maddow — on Twitter. A handful of social conservatives also expressed alarm over the selection of a campaign aide who is not just gay, but has also publicly endorsed same-sex marriage.

Grenell suggested in one tweet that Callista Gingrich’s hair looked snapped on. Another criticized Rachel Maddow’s looks. His first tweet after his hiring was announced by Romney’s camp to great fanfare was that “not all gays” are “big government liberals.” The outspoken Grenell was also targeted in media stories, which had on-the-record quotes from reporters who’d worked with him in his former U.N. role criticizing his performance.

During both flaps, Romney did not publicly defend or rebuke his new aide. And the silence was an instance in which Romney’s notorious caution — an attribute that helped him at various points in the primary race — ultimately came back to bite his campaign.

The team opted not to fan the flames of the Twitter controversy by, as it often does, pretending the flap didn’t exist. The tweets were part of the reason that the campaign tried to steer clear of the debate among some evangelicals about Grenell’s role on the campaign. But that left Romneyland exposed to criticism when Grenell departed, with the original story on a Washington Post blog describing him as “hounded” by anti-gay evangelical figure Bryan Fischer, whom the candidate had personally denounced at a Values Voters summit months ago.

Grenell didn’t play a leading role in the Romney operation during a crucial week: He was absent from the back and forth with the Obama campaign surrounding the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death. Multiple campaign sources insisted Grenell was not even supposed to begin his formal role with the campaign until May 1, and they said there was no move to sequester him.

But Christian Whiton, who served in the Bush State Department as a political appointee and spoke with Grenell on Tuesday, told POLITICO: “Basically, Ric got Etch-A-Sketched.”